Latino leaders in Dallas say they hope the arrival of a new Mexican consul means legal assistance to immigrants remains high, especially if Congress approves legalization for some of those here unlawfully.

Juan Carlos Cue Vega left before Thanksgiving, two weeks before last Saturday’s inauguration of Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto. The Dallas successor for one of the largest consulates for Mexico is expected to be named several weeks after an inauguration that returns Mexico’s old often-authoritarian party to government rule after a 12-year absence.

A Mexican ex-police officer who fled the narcotics violence of Juárez, Mexico, was denied asylum by a federal immigration judge in Dallas.

The case of José Alarcón was heard in late November in a closed hearing in a federal immigration court here.

A spokeswoman for the federal Executive Office for Immigration Review said Thursday that the Dallas judge issued an opinion last week. The agency within the U.S. Justice Department didn’t disclose a copy of the written opinion.

Alarcón’s case is one of an increasing number of asylum requests made in the last year by Mexicans as the death toll grows in Mexico, where the military and federal agents are fighting cartels and corruption within their own ranks.

Alarcón, 27, told The Dallas Morning News last year that he refused to be bought off and that he was in a 2008 gunbattle in the border city across from El Paso as a result.

Claudia Alarcón worried constantly that her husband, a police officer in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, would leave her a young widow with two children. After a big balacera, a gunfight, in April 2008, she rushed to the hospital when she heard officers had been hit.

“I didn’t know who was dead or wounded,” said Alarcón, who is now 25. “Imagine, he is the pillar of our family and they [the drug cartels] forgive nothing.”

Her husband, José Alarcón, was among the wounded; a bullet had hit his leg and flying glass cut his head and arms. He had emptied all 15 rounds in his Beretta 9 mm. He was ordered back to work immediately, Alarcón said. He was refused fresh ammunition. That’s when it dawned on him: He was being set up to be killed by his own bosses, he said.

Soon, the Alarcóns and their two children were fleeing across the Bridge of the Americas and into the sister city of El Paso to ask for asylum. José Alarcón’s high-profile case and the real-time drama of the U.S.-Mexico drug war are expected to be heard today in a Dallas immigration court.

Immigration prosecutions in the federal courts more than quadrupled during the eight years of the Bush administration and Texas’ two border districts led the nation in the surge, according to a new report by a Syracuse University research center.